I write about those people (geologists, art historians, historians, and curators), places (museums, universities, and societies), and things (fossils, paintings, and historical artifacts) that shape our understanding of the world. I am not so much interested in the history of ideas as in the very nature of art, geology, history, and the museum. And like my recommended authors, the approach I take to my subjects is, I hope, always rather novel. In The Great Fossil Enigma, for example, I felt that the tiny, suggestive, but ultimately ambiguous, nature of the fossils permitted me to see into the scientific mind. This tends to be where extinct animals live after their demise.
I wrote
The Great Fossil Enigma: The Search for the Conodont Animal
This classic book hooked me on page one. Björn Kurtén’s curiosity soon becomes your curiosity and before long you are thinking like a paleontologist. It may be an old book, but the author’s thinking remains modern. Indeed, a recent review of cave bear research suggests that our knowledge of these animals hasn’t changed all that much since Kurtén’s day. I love old geology books. Beautifully written, they enable you to discover, imagine, and ultimately to care about an animal that exists only as a pile of bones. This book proved to be very influential.
Combining ?biography and intellectual history, Steven Rockefeller offers an illuminating introduction to the philosophy of John Dewey, with special emphasis on the evolution of the religious faith and moral vision at the heart of his thought. This study pays particular attention to Dewey's radical democratic reconstruction of Christianity and his many contributions to the American tradition of spiritual democracy. Rockefeller presents the first full exploration of Dewey's religious thought, including its mystical dimension. Covering Dewey's entire intellectual life, the author provides a clear introduction to Dewey's early neo-Hegelian idealism as well as to his later naturalistic metaphysics, epistemology, theory of…
Fiffer describes himself as a lawyer, journalist, and author. For the story he tells, these turn out to be perfect qualifications because he is not so much interested in telling the reader about the animal as in the scandal and intrigue that surrounded the discovery of this now-famous museum specimen. A fast-paced tale of unexpected twists and turns, when the FBI appears you start to wonder if you haven’t slipped into the pages of a David Baldacci thriller. It's a great true story and one likely to raise your eyebrows.
In 1990, the skeleton of a battle-scarred Tyrannosaurus rex matriarch was found, virtually complete, in what many call the most spectacular dinosaur fossil discovery to date. Not just another dinosaur book, Tyrannosaurus Sue is a fascinating introduction to the centuries-old history of commercial fossil hunting, a legal thriller and a provocative look at academic versus commercial science and the chase for the money that fuels both. - Steve Fiffer, an attorney who has followed the story for the past seven years, has captured the whole range of characters and issues embroiled in the fight for Sue. Fiffer communicates both the…
This climate fiction novel follows four generations of women and their battles against a global giant that controls and manipulates Earth’s water. Told mostly through a diary and drawing on scientific observation and personal reflection, Lynna’s story unfolds incrementally, like climate change itself. Her gritty memoir describes a near-future Toronto…
A brilliant evolutionary paleontologist, Gould was one of science’s great disruptors, frequently calling on his peers to rethink old thoughts. He was also one of America’s great popularizers of natural history. When first published, this book was described as ‘a masterpiece of analysis and imagination’ and its author ‘the finest scientific essayist writing today’. In Wonderful Life, Gould exploresthe discovery and interpretation of those strange animals that inhabited Earth when complex life first evolved. He also uses the book to develop his own controversial thesis about the development of life. The book remains a great work of non-fiction. It perfectly captures that unique combination of erudition and showmanship that was Stephen Jay Gould.
High in the Canadian Rockies is a small limestone quarry formed 530 million years ago called the Burgess Shale. It hold the remains of an ancient sea where dozens of strange creatures lived-a forgotten corner of evolution preserved in awesome detail. In this book Stephen Jay Gould explores what the Burgess Shale tells us about evolution and the nature of history.
Reviewers of TheGreat Fossil Enigmathought that book strange. If they tried to think of a book like it, then they alighted on this one. I don’t see much similarity, but I do think Cohen’s book is strange. Her first paragraph is a single sentence of just seven words. It is: ‘This is not a book about mammoths.’ That sentence isn’t quite true because the book is about mammoths, but Cohen uses these animals as a pretext for a much grander history of science. The approach couldn’t be more different from the other books on my list.
From cave paintings to the latest Siberian finds, woolly mammoths have fascinated people across Europe, Asia and North America for centuries. Remains of these enormous prehistoric animals were among the first fossils to be recognized as such, and they have played a crucial role in the birth and development of paleontology. In this lively, wide-ranging look at the fate of the mammoth, Claudine Cohen reanimates this large mammal with heavy curved tusks and shaggy brown hair through its history in science, myth and popular culture. Cohen uses the mammoth and the theories that naturalists constructed around it to illuminate wider…
Pete is content living a simple life in the remote Montana town of Sleeping Grass, driving the local garbage truck with his pot-bellied pig Pearl and wondering about what could've been. Elderly widow Wilma is busy meddling in Pete's life to try and make up for past wrongs that he…
In 2000, Errol Fuller published an entirely new, lavishly illustrated, edition of his 1987 book,Extinct Birds. In the years since it was first publishedmore birds had been lost while others he had described as extinct had subsequently been rediscovered. Extinct Birdsdocuments 85 species that have disappeared since 1600, including the Eskimo Curlew and Choiseul Crested Pigeon, as well as the more famous Passenger Pigeon, Great Auk, and Dodo. All are now dead and gone (probably!). A book of fascinating, if ultimately sad, tales, and beautiful pictures, it should encourage us to care about those species now on the edge of extinction like the Kakapo, the Kiwi, and the massively poached African Grey Parrot.
This book tells the story of a scientific journey of twists and turns through assertions and denials, past alien monsters and incoming asteroids, through a world of unexpected discoveries and real utility, which ultimately arrives at an animal that, rather surprisingly, seems to say something about our own ancestry. The fossils were so small, that really seeing them was no easy matter. Indeed, the millions of these things present in collections around the world today might, if poured like so many grains of sand, fit into a few shoe boxes. For more than 150 years, the conodont was science’s El Dorado. It remains arguably the most disputed creature in the zoological world.
Why We Hate asks why a social animal like Homo sapiens shows such hostility to fellow species members. The invasion of the Ukraine by Russia? The antisemitism found on US campuses in the last year? The answer and solution lies in the Darwinian theory of evolution through natural selection.
At the age of forty-nine, Laurie Woodford rents out her house, packs her belongings into two suitcases, and leaves her life in upstate New York to relocate to Seoul, South Korea. What begins as an opportunity to teach college English in Asia evolves into a nomadic adventure.
